I Gave Up Beauty to Be Me
To the world, I was conventionally attractive. Then I transitioned.
To the world, I was conventionally attractive. Then I transitioned.
This piece contains discussion of eating disorders, weight, body image, and gender dysphoria.
It was the first day of spring semester, and my friend Soyeon and I were catching up over lunch, trading stories of what we’d been up to over winter break. As the conversation hit a lull, Soyeon looked a bit gloomy.
“I gained weight over the break,” she confessed, following up by sharing the exact number of pounds.
I cringed. As someone who was just beginning to confront my own eating disorder, I couldn’t handle this kind of talk about weight, about gains and losses and needing a new wardrobe and hating oneself. Also, I had a bad feeling about where this conversation was going next.
After insulting her body a bit more, Soyeon’s face brightened, and she turned her focus toward mine. “I wish I had a body like yours. It’s perfect.”
I cringed some more. “Ohh, thank you…”
“In Korea it’s called an S-shaped body,” she said, miming a curvy silhouette with her hands.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “People have told me I’m an hourglass…”
“You look perfect,” she reiterated.
I felt trapped. It wasn’t just my disordered eating that made this conversation so uncomfortable. It was that despite constantly being told that I was the perfect specimen of womanhood, I knew I wasn’t a woman, and I loathed being seen as one.
Having something that others desperately wanted, yet knowing it wasn’t really for me produced a kind of twisted guilt. I hadn’t asked to be the perfect woman. I never wanted this body. It came with a lot of social power, but it felt like a cage.
I wanted to reject the whole premise of Soyeon’s comment — tell her that no body is perfect, or that all bodies are — but it wouldn’t make any difference. We both knew what she meant. I had a body that society approved of. She envied it because she envied the privileges it gave me. I couldn’t deny the truth of what she meant.
I knew I wasn’t a woman, and I loathed being seen as one.
So I just grimace-smiled, thanked Soyeon again, and quickly found an excuse to collect my things and leave.
Before I transitioned, I used to receive a lot of compliments like Soyeon’s. It usually started with a woman bemoaning her own appearance. After a few moments of self-recrimination, her attention would snap onto me. The refrain always sounded the same: “You’re perfect. You’re an hourglass. You have curves in all the right places. You have the perfect feminine body.” They meant well, the people who said these things, but their words left me feeling like I’d been grabbed by a mob of strangers with sticky, candy-coated hands.
Every now and then, the compliments would instead focus on my face. The comments about beauty came from men more often than women. They probably thought it sounded less crass than commenting on my shape. “You’re so beautiful. You’re so pretty. Can I take a picture of you to send to my friends, so that they can see that angels are real?” A guy really said that to me.
Complaining about this rarely went well. People thought I was being a spoiled brat. My friend Jane, for example, had little sympathy when I ranted about a man who’d approached me on the street and asked me on a date. “I hate it,” I told her. “He knew nothing about me and yet he thought he wanted to hang out with me. I don’t want people to decide they like me based on what my body looks like.”
“How you look is a part of who you are,” Jane told me. “Of course people are going to respond to that.”
“But I didn’t choose to look like this,” I protested.
“But you did,” she said. “If you don’t want that kind of attention, stop dressing the way you do. You could make yourself uglier if you wanted to.”
At that time, I was putting almost no effort into my appearance. I seldom wore makeup. I cut my own hair, badly. I had never plucked my eyebrows. All my clothing was from the bargain bin at Forever 21. I never moisturized.
None of that mattered. I looked conventionally hot anyway. I was young, thin, and white, with skin that birth control pills had rendered clear and supple. I was blonde. I had almost no body hair. I had a large chest and a small waist. I was a shy fertility goddess that didn’t have too much courage and didn’t take up too much space. I was exactly what people believed a woman should be.
People mistook all these physical features for choices I was making. In truth, I was too depressed and filled with self-loathing to make any decisions about how I genuinely wanted to look. My only motivation was fitting in, flying under the radar, following the rules — and since I had inherited a body society deemed “perfect,” following the rules was easy. Even without making any effort, I looked like I was tweezing my eyebrows, wearing makeup, and “maintaining my figure.”
I told myself it was strategic: My camouflage would keep me safe. People smiled at me and sometimes gave me free things because I was beautiful. I’d be a fool to squander that superpower. Yet every time someone complimented my beauty, my perfection, I felt sick to my stomach, and reality would start to feel like it was shaking apart.
Some people think trans-masculine people chose to transition because we were “failures” at being women. Others think we transition in order to get attention — we want to be special, to become eye-catching by being strange. Both claims are totally laughable to me. I just wanted to survive.
A year after my conversation with Soyeon, my eating disorder was nearly killing me. I was depressed and socially isolated, sobbing all night long. I yearned for friends but lacked the confidence to get them. I spent hours taking long walks and crying in parks and cemeteries.
When I was in public, I wore a mask of mild cheerfulness, carefully filtering everything that I did and said. No one could get close to me, because I was so deeply ashamed of the person beneath the veneer. I was desperate to be socially acceptable, to be normal, to be okay — but the more I tried to fly under the radar, the more I disappeared.
And then I started reading online about trans identities. I started talking online to other trans people, and carefully confessing the way I had always felt. And slowly the mask began developing a few cracks.
Even though I hated being a woman, it hurt to finally give up the charade. Each step toward expressing my authentic, nonbinary male identity meant casting off a layer of my exoskeleton. Cutting my long hair meant I could no longer hide behind it. Stopping birth control left my skin mottled with acne. Dressing in a more masculine way meant people no longer saw me as worthy of a smile when I passed them on the street.
Each change, no matter how small, required months of contemplation. I’d fantasize about starting testosterone, or buying a binder, but I’d also agonize over what such changes would cost me. In my mind, women were seen as soft, lovable, and deserving of tenderness; if I destroyed my femininity, people would love me less. It was horrible, seeing myself as public property in that way.
No one could get close to me, because I was so deeply ashamed of the person beneath the veneer.
I worried about my partner losing his attraction for me. I feared strangers viewing me as disgusting or a freak. I’d make a small change, like growing out my body hair, and then guilt would consume me until I did something feminine to compensate for it, like buying a new dress. For a while I tried, delusionally, to have it both ways: I tried to be myself, but only in a way that was okay with others.
It went on like this for years. I’d decide to change my name, then spend six months feeling too chickenshit to tell anyone. I’d slink into the men’s restroom, but only when I knew nobody was there. I’d admire my changing physique, and feel more at home in it, yet blanch at the thought of somebody else noticing it. Surely, the real me would be rejected. Surely I was the only person who could love the unfeminine creature I was becoming.
Yet with every change that I did permit myself, I felt more relaxed and happy. I worried less about my appearance, and I found my reflection less and less jarring to look at. New clothing changed how I moved. A lower voice made it easier for me to share what I had to say. When I saw photos of myself, I felt affection and love for the person I saw. I found them attractive. That had never happened before.
It’s hard to describe how immense my relief was. Gender transition stories fall back on a lot of clichés for a reason. It’s hard to do justice to the experience. I went from hating and policing and monitoring everything about myself, constantly being nauseated with who I was on a soul-level, to just… being at ease.
Men and nonbinary people are precious jewels just as much as women are. We all deserve love.
I used to be disturbed by any reminder of my physical form. I used to hate moving through the world. It felt agonizing and false. I’d look at my reflection or a photo of myself, and feel tension and hatred. I couldn’t imagine my future in any remotely hopeful way. Now, I am no longer an object, I’m a subject — I act, I decide, I do. I have a future. I am not beheld.
Several people have told me that before I transitioned, it was like I wearing a veil. I was “hard to know.” The post-transition me seems more open, they say, and freer. That’s all very true. But that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy or linear road to self-acceptance.
I still feel doubts. I still worry that one day I will regret squandering the loveliness I once had. Men aren’t lovely, I sometimes think when I’m afraid. Men don’t deserve tenderness. Men are not beautiful. Nobody will baby a man when he’s sick. Nobody will hold him while he sobs. No one will look on him with wonder or adoration. Do I really want to head in that direction? Won’t it be lonesome, to stop being a precious object?
I keep testing those fears against reality, and I keep finding the fears wanting. Masculine people are lovely. Men and nonbinary people are precious jewels just as much as women are. We all deserve love. People who say otherwise have had their brains polluted by binary thinking and toxic masculinity.
These days, people with conventional, binary expectations like me less than they used to. Most of the people who used to tell me how “perfect” I looked aren’t in my life anymore. But honestly, their approval always fucking sucked to receive. It corroded me from the inside out.
The more I throw away my beauty, the more people see and love the actual me. No one can truly love a facade, no matter how perfect that facade is.
There’s a lyric in “Don’t Judge Me” by Janelle Monáe that always makes my heart break, because I recognize my pre-transition self in it: “Even though you tell me you love me, I’m afraid that you just love my disguise.”
I used to think I needed my cis-woman disguise in order to be loved because the truth of me was too strange to be beautiful. It has been terrifying to strip myself of every layer of my costume, to bear the ugliness — or what society has deemed as ugliness — in order to be able to breathe. But by doing that, I’ve opened myself up to the experience of real love. And more importantly, I’ve finally become capable of loving myself.